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Mar Menor, a 135-square-kilometer (52-square-mile) lagoon in southern Spain, is the only ecosystem in Europe that can be named a victim in a legal case. In September 2022, the Spanish Senate granted the largest saltwater lagoon in the Mediterranean legal personhood. From then on, any human who wanted to help Mar Menor could represent it in court.

For those in the budding Rights of Nature movement, who recognize the planet and all its ecosystems as living beings with inalienable rights, the Mar Menor victory was a breakthrough. The first body of water in Europe granted legal personhood, the move caught the region up to similar legal successes elsewhere, such as with Colombia’s Atrato River in 2016 and New Zealand’s Whanganui River in 2017.

Protection for Mar Menor came after a series of mass die-offs ravaged the ecosystem. In 2016, excessive nutrient runoff triggered a massive algal bloom that turned parts of the lagoon a misty green and killed 85 percent of its marine vegetation. Then in 2019, and again in 2021, nutrient runoff stripped the lagoon of oxygen, suffocating thousands of fish and crustaceans, and littering its shores with creatures gasping for air.

Spurred by the crises, environmental activists, lawmakers, and local residents banded together. They collected around 640,000 signatures and, in 2022, successfully pushed a citizen initiative through the Spanish parliament’s upper chamber. Their efforts resulted in a new law granting Mar Menor and its surrounding basin rights in every sense of the word: the right to live and flourish; the right to be protected; and the right to recover. The law’s Article 6 was particularly groundbreaking. It stated that any person or relevant legal entity “is entitled to defend the ecosystem of the Mar Menor.”

“The right to recovery is no longer something that depends on a ministry wanting to do it, but it is a right of the Mar Menor,” says Teresa Vicente. A law professor at the nearby University of Murcia, Vicente earned the Goldman Environmental Award, often called the Green Nobel, for the key role she played in driving the initiative and writing the law that gives personhood to Mar Menor.

But three years on, Mar Menor is still waiting for humans to act on their promises. So I visited this famous coastal lagoon—the name of which translates to Minor Sea—and chatted with some of its protectors to find out what was happening on the ground.

The sound of Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” and the stomping of boots on hardwood echoed against the neon-bathed walls of O’Donnell’s in Lockhart’s town square. This Pride of Caldwell County dance night was one of eight events that the organization hosted over the last week of June, and with the bar packed from end to end with line dancers, onlookers singing along, and laughter, there was no shortage of celebration in this small Texas town.

Nestled in the heart of Central Texas, Caldwell County is better known as the barbecue capital of the state. But over the past few years, it’s also become home to a growing and visible LGBTQ+ community, a transformation sparked, in part, by a conversation among friends in 2021.

That year, a group gathered in Lockhart Arts and Craft, a bar just around the corner from O’Donnell’s, and laid the foundation for what would become Pride of Caldwell County, a grassroots nonprofit organization committed to building LGBTQ+ community and visibility in the region.

“Even just a few years earlier, there was so much more hesitation about starting something like this,” said Haley Fort, one of Pride of Caldwell County’s board members. “Pride did not have the same presence back then and we didn’t have stickers showing safe spaces or anything.”

It started with a dream: The Old Dykes Home.

Envisioned during beach trips with friends nearly 30 years ago, this is how Pat McAulay first thought of the concept that would become Village Hearth, the first LGBTQ cohousing community in the nation for people 55 and over.

“Any older lesbian you speak to has this dream of living together or living in close proximity and taking care of one another,” McAulay said. “Because people from our generation… come out of the closet and then have to go back in, in old age. That was the biggest fear, the treatment you’d get in a nursing home or some sort of a facility. And so that's where the idea came from: You take care of your own, as long as you can.”

In 2015, McAulay and her wife Margaret Roesch began seriously developing plans for Village Hearth, a sprawling fifteen-acre property in Durham, North Carolina, where lush gardens and 28 accessible, pastel cottages are now home to more than three dozen older LGBTQ adults and allies, some of whom The Flytrap met during a recent visit. Gathered in Village Hearth’s common house for coffee and cake, residents shared their many reasons for choosing cohousing, the challenges of close quarters and cooperative self-governance, and the model that Village Hearth can provide to other queer and trans people who want to support each other through the aging process.

“This isn’t for everyone,” McAulay laughed. “You have to be able to really listen. It can’t just be, ‘I’ve got this great idea to fix this problem and I’m going to do it.’ You have to be able to listen to everyone’s input, and adjust—it’s the only way to live in cohousing and it’s best for creating community.”

Have you ever looked at the map in a video game and thought: wow, I wish this was just the entire game? Or maybe you’ve found yourself playing a board game and thought: there’s not enough pixels in this? You’re in luck.

In the late 1980s, advancements in procedural generation tech gave rise to the booming “simulation” genre, which is characterized by games that model complex, real-world situations and environments. Players are often tasked with both responding to changes the sim throws their way while simultaneously trying to shape the sim to achieve their own specific goals: whether economic, civic, interpersonal, or in the art of war.

Although this subgenre of strategy games had been established prior to the modern moniker, the “4X” name (short for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) is believed to have originated from the 1993 release of sci-fi sim Master of Orion, wherein the four “Xes” were used to describe its gameplay mechanics. This snappy little device also perfectly described the typical gameplay verbs within other games in the subgenre… and it stuck. And if seeing a giant billboard for Sid Meier’s Civilization VII while driving on the 405 S the other day isn’t proof enough: this style of game has clearly stood the test of time. Yet for all the popularity of the modern Civ games, it’s one forgotten title from 1999 that would most accurately depict the arc of human civilization throughout the 21st century.

[...] Civilization: Call to Power (1999) was undeniably a Civ game based on its gameplay and its isometric, cobbled aesthetics, but when it isn’t forgotten by Civ players entirely, it’s best remembered for its many unique eccentricities. Despite being developed by an entirely different team with no involvement from Sid Meier or greater MicroProse whatsoever, the core elements of the 4X style remain firmly intact: players would begin on a small part of the map and must explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate, all complete with its now legendary “Wonder” videos which played upon each unlock. A few standout features include the spy/stealth units in warfare, the slavery system (and subsequent “abolition” development), a rather pointed distaste for lawyers (hmm), and the very cool potential of building underwater or space-based cities in the later stages.

However, it’s this progression of the game’s timeline that makes some real deviations from the Civ formula. “You soon get the feeling that the game is rushing you through the early eras of the world – the ancient, classical and medieval – so that it can show you the crazy shit it has in store later on. ‘Who cares about bloody horses and spearmen and rickety chariots clip-clopping along dirt roads and uncharted lands?’ it seems to say. ‘You’ve seen all that crap before, haven’t you?’” writes Robert Zak at Rock Paper Shotgun.

Most Civilization games mark the completion of a campaign when the player reaches somewhere in the early 21st Century. This would be the “near future” for games released in the late 1990s, but Call to Power made the unique choice of making the end date the year 3000 instead. And the far future? It kinda sucks.

Maria Montalvo speaks with emotion, her eyes shining as she recounts her reading experiences. She says she especially enjoys books by Isabel Allende, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Erika L. Sánchez and John Grisham because, in her words, “reading makes you wiser and you learn how people live in other countries. It takes your mind to other places you can’t travel to.”

Montalvo isn’t an ordinary reader. During her incarceration at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, a prison in New Jersey, she has participated in the activities of Freedom Reads, a nonprofit organization that has been promoting reading in U.S. prisons since 2020.

“Freedom Reads has brought books on different topics, and it’s very important to read because it makes you wiser,” Montalvo, 60, said in an interview with Noticias Telemundo. “Books change the prison climate; they change the way people think about themselves. This opens your mind and makes you want to change.”

Developing nations are challenging Big Tech’s decades-long hold on global data by demanding that their citizens’ information be stored locally. The move is driven by the realization that countries have been giving away their most valuable resource for tech giants to build a trillion-dollar market capitalization.

In April, Nigeria asked Google, Microsoft, and Amazon to set concrete deadlines for opening data centers in the country. Nigeria has been making this demand for about four years, but the companies have so far failed to fulfill their promises. Now, Nigeria has set up a working group with the companies to ensure that data is stored within its shores.

“We told them no more waivers — that we need a road map for when they are coming to Nigeria,” Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, director-general of Nigeria’s technology regulator, the National Information Technology Development Agency, told Rest of World.

Other developing countries, including India, South Africa, and Vietnam, have also implemented similar rules demanding that companies store data locally. India’s central bank requires payment companies to host financial data within the country, while Vietnam mandates that foreign telecommunications, e-commerce, and online payments providers establish local offices and keep user data within its shores for at least 24 months.

Slovenia’s liberal Prime Minister Robert Golob said on Friday that he intends to call a consultative referendum on the country’s NATO membership, following a surprise defeat in parliament over a related measure on defence spending.

"There are only two ways: either we remain in NATO and pay membership, or we leave the alliance – everything else is populist deceit of the citizens of Slovenia," Golob said, according to a government statement.

His referendum is expected to be formally tabled next week.

Golob’s gambit comes as part of a damage control effort in response to a successful initiative by The Left party, a junior partner in his centre-left coalition, pushing for a consultative referendum on increasing defence expenditure.

If you took a straw poll of the general public, chances are that few people would have any idea what space weather is, if they’ve ever heard the term at all. In contrast to terrestrial weather, space weather cannot be felt. It doesn’t warm your skin, drench your clothes or blow down your fence. Unlike the floods, droughts and hurricanes that have beset human civilizations since ancient times, it is not an age-old threat. For the first 10,000 years of human civilization, the sun’s flares and CMEs would have had no impact on life at all.

It is only since humanity constructed a planet-scale network of electromagnetic technologies, and subsequently grew to depend on that network for just about everything, that the sun’s activity became a potential hazard. In basic terms, the primary danger of space weather is its capacity to produce an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Upon making contact with the upper reaches of the atmosphere (the ionosphere), charged particles thrown out by the sun can instigate a “geomagnetic storm”, inducing currents in the Earth’s crust that overwhelm electrical equipment and its infrastructure, resulting in cascading malfunctions, power surges and blackouts. Anything that relies on electricity is vulnerable. Satellites, power grids, aviation, railways, communications, farming, heavy industry, military installations, global trade, financial transactions — the categories of vital systems that could be impacted by a sun-borne EMP are endless and interconnected, affecting every facet of our networked society.

The United Kingdom-based MOSWOC is one of only three institutions worldwide tasked with assessing and forecasting that risk. (The other two are in Boulder, Colorado, and Adelaide, Australia.) Each monitors solar activity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Low-severity space weather, like the expulsions Waite was scrutinizing during my visit, occurs all the time. During the solar maximum, MOSWOC usually records around 1,000 such events per year.

But playing at the back of every forecaster’s mind is the hypothetical centennial event, the moment when a sunspot might dispatch a solar storm at a scale that we know has happened historically, but never in our modern, technological age.

The curious paradox at the heart of space forecasting is that the satellites and supercomputers that empower the observations are themselves vectors of vulnerability. The more umbilical our relationship to technology becomes — the more our lives and livelihoods become governed by algorithms and automation — the greater the risk of disaster.

Inside the guarded bubble of the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, there are signs of a problem. Next to the security carousels, a large sign, replicated all over the hallways, says: “In response to the ongoing UN budget crisis, we have had to reduce operating hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.” During the past two years, corridors and meeting rooms of the Palais des Nations have been occasionally kept in the dark, central heating and elevators cut to save on the very inflated Swiss electricity bills. Back in December 2023, the UN’s liquidity crisis got so dire that the Palais was shut down for three whole weeks. Ahead of a security meeting, a source told me a Russian delegate once joked in front of a dead elevator that they should turn the power off for Americans but not for him: His country had already paid its yearly contribution to the UN.

The much delayed, years-long renovation of the UN buildings, which has overrun its budget by as much as 118 million CHF ($144 million), adds a layer of uncertainty to the otherwise neatly sophisticated decor. Construction gear lies in the grass. A sign about Building E, the building where the main conference rooms are, states, nostalgically, that it was once the world’s largest glass window. (The world’s largest glass window is now in China, according to the Guinness Book of World Records). Behind the rain-soaked foliage of the gardens, a peacock wails. Peacocks were offered as a gift to the UN by India’s permanent mission in the 1980s and, as a result, the UN gardens are full of them. They are still being fed by Geneva’s municipal staff.

The World Health Assembly brings together the representatives of 194 states every year in May. It is one of the year’s highlights for the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN agency dedicated to health. Inside Building E, the atmosphere is busy, focused, even expectant. It is May 20, the second day of the assembly, and a much anticipated-session is taking place in Room XX — also known as the Human Rights and Alliance of Civilizations Room. Member states are discussing whether or not they will approve measures proposed by the WHO’s director, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, to shrink down its core budget for 2026-27 to $4.2 billion from $5.3 billion and to increase membership fees by 20 percent to try to fill the anticipated budget gap of more than $1.7 billion due in part to a lack of U.S. contributions. The fees vary from one country to another, proportional to GDP. In a drastic move aimed at showing member states the reforms will not spare anyone, the WHO would reduce the number of its departments from 76 to 34 and, in June 2025, the senior leadership team in Geneva from 12 to seven directors. “The hard truth is that we need to reduce salary expenditures by 25 percent,” Ghebreyesus said at a member state briefing in late April.

Under the colorful stalactites dripping from the round ceiling of Room XX, a sculpture by Spanish artist Miquel Barceló representing multiculturalism and tolerance, the room was full and attentive. First Qatar, then Senegal, Togo, Spain, Colombia, Brazil, China, Lebanon and the U.K. spoke for three minutes each, the time allotted to member states. Member states unanimously agreed on the budget cuts.

The UN has been knee-deep in a liquidity crisis since 2023, with more member states paying late each year and some of them not paying at all, leaving the organization’s cash reserves exhausted. China regularly pays late. Afghanistan, Bolivia and Venezuela are in arrears. In 2023 only 82.3 percent of the budget had been collected, leaving $859 million in unpaid contributions. So when the United States, which owes the UN approximately $1.5 billion in arrears for the regular UN budget and about $1.2 billion for the peacekeeping budget, announced in January that it was cutting nearly all its foreign aid, the effect was devastating. The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) scaled back its operations in nine countries. The World Food Program had to cut back food assistance for tens of millions of people. The UN’s Population Fund (UNFPA) terminated 48 grants, halting maternal health care, protection from violence and other lifesaving services for women and girls. In Afghanistan alone, the WHO closed 200 health facilities, meaning that 1.84 million people lost access to essential health care and vaccination programs. Twenty-seven countries in Africa and Asia face crippling breakdowns in tuberculosis diagnosis and treatment. The global network of 700 measles and rubella labs is at risk of collapse, malaria diagnoses and deliveries of bed nets and medicines have been delayed, the polio and mpox programs are unable to function as before.